I often have to complete a 9 or 10 minute motion graphics training video in 3 or 4 days. While not hard to do, the animations suffer from the short development times. Along came Animation Composer, which is a "free" tool that helps speed the process. The plugin is "free", but to really get good use from it you have to add a few of their animation packets, which brings the price to about $100.00. STILL worth the price because it simplified the entire animation process.

Well they just came out with version 2 and now the value of this tool has just gone way up! The new functionality and UI lets you easily change the timing of the animations, move anchor points, adjust the length of the layers with the animations, and so much more. They also added pre-comps that contain different animated shape layers which you can edit to your hearts content (these are also extra money). Oh, one of the SUCKY things about the pre-comps is you have to be on line to create new ones. Once created you no longer have to be on line, and they never go away once created, but it still sucks and I hope they change that.

Bottom line is for $150 (I bought one of the pre-comp packs), I am now able to produce highly animated training videos in a matter of days. The plugin is free and you can test everything out in it, and use it, without ever buying a single thing. But the animation and pre-comp packs make it a lot more valuable